A Requiem For Humanity: Fuck AI In The Arts!
The fashion industry has always walked hand in hand with delusion. We worship beauty like it’s a currency, we dress our ambitions in silk and call it vision, and yet we pretend fashion is democratic when everybody knows it never was, and never should be. It is a world built on obsession, sacrifice, myth-making and the cruelty of standards. But recently, a new delusion has entered the room. Not couture-madness or genius-level experimentation but the industrial illusion of artificial intelligence masquerading as artistic evolution.
Vogue, the dying monarch yearning for influence, decided to test us. They planted a seed and observed us adjust. Their August 2025 Guess advertisement unveiled a blonde “model” who, to be very specific, does not exist. Perfect cheekbones, pouted lips, breasts designed with as much emotional depth as silicone, collarbones chiseled by someone who has never felt an instance of hunger in their life. A smile that feels less seductive and more like a dentist’s screensaver.
It wasn’t innovation; it was a science experiment. It was them whispering: “Will they let us get away with this?” And some people clapped because they call it the future. Darling, if that is the future, therefore I say, “Death, to all of us!”
Let’s revisit the obvious: fashion thrives on aspiration. Not relatability. God forbid we forget the difference. Gisele Bündchen is extraordinary not because her face hits some AI-approved symmetry ratio, but because she is made of flesh and bones, just like you. That is what makes it holy. When I look at an AI model, I don’t feel aspiration. I see a lie with WiFi. There is no grandmother’s nose or childhood ballet trauma, no adolescent insecurity or no life lived behind those glimmering eyes. The AI model and Gisele may be both beautiful on paper. The difference between either isn’t beauty, it’s blood. One has soul and the other has metadata.
If the decline of Victoria’s Secret taught the industry anything, it is that in the quest to democratize glamour, they traded their glory for “everyone gets wings”. A legacy dissolved into a committee-approved sentiment. Not everyone can be a model and that is precisely the point. But now we have arrived somewhere much worse: a world where, apparently, no one needs to be one. Real bodies became too political, real desire too dangerous, real femininity too fragile for modern society. So they invented the perfect woman — the one who never speaks, never ages, never bruises and most importantly… never breathes.
If the goal was to kill a dream a million girls had in common, congratulations! You mechanized it.
Fashion without humanity is not fashion. It is commerce with delusions of grandeur. A couture house lives not in the runway, but in the calloused fingertips of embroiderers, the sleep-deprived designer pinning a dress at midnight, the seamstress who learned from her grandmother, the model starving in Paris at seventeen having Marlboro Gold cigarettes for breakfast while believing her face might change the world. AI knows none of this. It is not haunted by perfection, it just calculates it. It does not sacrifice nor does it innovate, it only replicates . A machine cannot produce beauty because beauty is not something we can call accurate. Beauty is seen and felt through intention, through suffering, through ego, through memory, and through the arrogance of wanting to be immortal.
And perhaps reading this you might start wondering if I am anti-technology. I do most of my research through AI, I’ve corrected work through AI, amongst many other things… tools do not threaten art, on the contrary, substitution does. A seamstress’s imperfect hand stitch contains more soul than a million algorithm-generated dresses. I’d rather wear a hand-sewn seam that took a lifetime to master than a programmed “smart textile”.
Progressives will argue that AI “expands creativity”, that resistance is fear or that the future demands surrender. No. All I hear is the voice of someone who confuses evolution with erasure. We innovate to elevate ourselves, not to replace ourselves. Humanity built pyramids, cathedrals, couture houses. AI builds replicas.
Innovation should only stretch imagination. Fashion without human hands, human madness or human ego? That isn’t future. A machine without childhood, without humiliation, without longing or without heartbreak cannot produce fashion. At most, it can only counterfeit it.
I do not consume fantasy manufactured by servers, nor do I worship mannequins that breathe through cooling fans. If beauty becomes software, then beauty dies. It’s simple and it’s plain. Let Silicon Valley play the role of God, but fashion belongs to us mortals. To all men and women made of flesh, to all artisans whose fingers ache, to all designers who burn for beauty and to all bodies that exist before a photograph.
And if the industry insists on worshipping simulations over souls? Then we will watch its funeral wearing Maison Margiela 2024 Artisanal Couture while listening to Pagliacci’s “Recitar!” performed by Pavarotti until our last breath exits our grieving lungs… and at least that will still be human.
WRITTEN BY FREDDY ESPINAL